I distinctly remember an enthusiastic cheer from the crowd I was sitting in at some the Windows 2000 launch years ago after the speaker announced that the number of events that require a restart had been reduced by a large percentage. Clearly this was a sore point with us Windows NT users. Now things have gotten much better, but the time still comes when a reboot is required and it is no less frustrating simply due to being less frequent a situation.

Save your work, close applications, wait for the restart (heaven forbid you have Altiris Bootworks or a PXE boot to wait for in there), then log back in and get rolling again. On a server this is a bigger concern as an outage needs to be coordinated, but on a workstation it is just a big inconvenience. Today this situation is most often encountered when installing software or updates that replace a file currently in use so this is what the Vista team set out to address…

In Windows Vista, applications that support "side-by-side compliant DLLs" can install a new version of a file even though the new one is in use. You can keep the application open and the update will take effect automatically the next time the application is restarted. Very cool indeed, but this is not a feature taken very heavy advantage of today-- applications need to be written to specifically take advantage of this Vista feature.